Hi folks,
In December of 2007, members of the Qt/KDE team gathered in Cáceres, Spain for
a meeting sponsored by the Government of Extremadura.
In the following weeks, we have been working towards the goals set at that
meeting, some of which have since been slightly altered.
Plans for KDE 3
==================
We will release Lenny with KDE 3.
The current KDE version in unstable is 3.5.8, which will shortly migrate to
testing. 3.5.9 does not yet have a release date, but it will be decided soon.
Therefore, Lenny will most likely be released with a version of 3.5.9 that
includes patches for the most important fixes from the upstream KDE 4 branch.
Additionally, the kdepim-enterprise branch is being merged with the current
kdepim, which will bring some features and bugfixes, most importantly to KMail.
Otherwise, the only major changes to our current KDE 3 packaging are some
re-working of the meta-packages and the removal of meta-kde-extras.
More info about this can be found on our webpage. [0][1]
Furthermore, I would like highlight that in the last year, we have attempted
to reduce the number of bugs filed against KDE packages (see graph [2]), but
it is difficult to keep the bug count low. Since some bugs fixed in KDE 4
remain in KDE 3, we will be closing them as fixed in the KDE 4.0.0 using BTS's
version tracking, and hopefully we will manage to backport some of these fixes
(the most important ones) to KDE 3.5.X.
However, we will close bugs filed against applications declared dead by
upstream, such as aRts.
Plans for KDE 4
=================
We will be shipping KDE 4.0 development platform with Lenny.
As you may know, KDE 4.0.0 is being released on the 11th of January
(tomorrow!).
We have been working very hard to get some nice KDE packages into Debian, and
you can presently find KDE 4.0.0 packages in experimental.
Instructions of how to install KDE 4 from experimental are at our website. [0]
The primary reason against shipping KDE 4.0 with Lenny is that this release
lacks many applications that would make KDE 4 a complete desktop, such as
KMail, and still requires a lot of overall polishing, making it unsuitable for
most users. KDE 4.1 is expected to fix most of these shortcomings, but the
release date has not yet been finalised.
The KDE developers are currently discussing the release schedules for KDE 4.0.x
and KDE 4.1. It appears that they are planning to do monthly updates for
KDE 4.0, and that KDE 4.1 will not be released before late July, making it
impossible to include within the current Debian release schedule.
For Lenny, we will instead be shipping the "KDE 4 development platform",
consisting of kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime, and possibly kdebindings.
We are planning to upload the 4.0.0 release to experimental, and probably next
week, barring any problems, push these 3 packages into unstable.
These packages are co-installable with the current KDE 3 version, allowing
users to run KDE 4 apps, such as the new Okular document viewer, in a KDE 3
desktop.
There are still some issues that need to be resolved, such as migration of
configuration files, since we have patched KDE 4 to store its settings in
~/.kde4 instead of ~/.kde .
KDE 4 will be easily installable using the upcoming meta-packages.
See our website for more information. [0][3]
Finally, we are publishing all the relevant information on our website [0]
with the dual goals of keeping our users informed, and providing an easy path
for new contributors to join the team. But some information is still work in
progress :)
Ana,
on behalf of the Qt/KDE team.
P.S.: Anyway, you never know what the future will bring, we will review our
decisitions with respect shipping KDE 4 in Lenny in a few months.
[0] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/
[1] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/metapackages-kde3.html
[2] http://users.alioth.debian.org/~pusling-guest/pkg-kde-buggraphs/_ALL_-year.png
[3] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/metapackages-kde4.html